Aspiring To Fullness In A Secular Age

Inspired by Charles Taylor's magisterial A Secular Age, essays offer a host of expert analyses of the religious and theological threads running throughout Taylor's oeuvre.

The loss or disaffiliation of young adults is a much-discussed topic in churches today. Many faith-formation programs focus on keeping the young, believing the youthful spirit will save the church. But do these programs have more to do with an obsession with youthfulness than with helping young people encounter the living God? Questioning the search for new or improved faith-formation programs, leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulates how faith can be formed in our secular age. He offers a theology of faith constructed from a rich cultural conversation, providing a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the "nones" and "moralistic therapeutic deism." Root helps readers understand why forming faith is so hard in our context and shows that what we have lost is not the ability to keep people connected to our churches but an imagination for how and where God could be present in their lives. He considers what faith is and what steps we can take to move into it, exploring a Pauline concept of faith as encounter with divine action.

In the course of a long and distinguished academic and civic career, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been, for articulate atheists and learned believers alike, an incisive, insightful, gracious, and challenging conversation partner on issues that arise at the intersection and interaction of religion, society, and culture. Grace and Freedom in a Secular Age offers a concise exposition of key ideas ? contingency, otherness, freedom, vulnerability and mutuality ? that inform his probing analyses of the dynamics of religious belief and religious denial in the pervasive contemporary culture he calls a "a secular age," within which religious belief and practice have, for many, become just an option. Those ideas provide the basis from which Rossi argues that, despite a clear-eyed recognition of the deep fractures of meaning and the pervasive fragmentation of once stable societal connections that a secular age has brought in its wake, Taylor also sees and affirms strong grounds for hope in a healing of our broken and fractured world and for the possibilities?and the importance of?active human participation in that healing. Taylor points to signs indicative of potent re-compositions and renewals taking place in religious belief and practice from its interaction with the dynamics of secular culture, particularly ones that make possible radical enactments of deeper human solidarity and mutuality, of which the one most often potent is the reconciliation of enemies. In pointing out these signs, Taylor suggests a richly expansive reading of the Christian doctrine of Creation, as it marks the radical contingency of all that is upon a freely bestowed divine self-giving: Creation is the ongoing enactment of the divine hospitality of the Triune God.

This book wishes to talk about two main topics: the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor and faith. Taylor, in his philosophical arguments on religion and secularity, has adopted what I call the great prejudice on religion and secularity: the two belong to utterly different spheres of human mind and sociality. In this prejudice, faith is used as a synonym of religion, or belief, and is understood as something that does not belong to the sphere of secularity. My argument contradicts precisely this common belief. Is faith more of an anthropological attitude towards reality than a religious one? Can we criticize Taylor's philosophy on these grounds? To develop my argument, I will attempt to develop a dialogue between continental and Anglo-American philosophers and theologians, in the hope of convincing the readers that we should change radically the way we discuss faith, religion, and secularism.

Reimagining Nature is a new introduction to the fast developing area of natural theology, written by one of the world’s leading theologians. The text engages in serious theological dialogue whilst looking at how past developments might illuminate and inform theory and practice in the present. This text sets out to explore what a properly Christian approach to natural theology might look like and how this relates to alternative interpretations of our experience of the natural world Alister McGrath is ideally placed to write the book as one of the world’s best known theologians and a chief proponent of natural theology This new work offers an account of the development of natural theology throughout history and informs of its likely contribution in the present This feeds in current debates about the relationship between science and religion, and religion and the humanities Engages in serious theological dialogue, primarily with Augustine, Aquinas, Barth and Brunner, and includes the work of natural scientists, philosophers of science, and poets

ECPA Christian Book Award 2021 Finalist: Biography & Memoir Explore Apologetics through the Lives of History's Great Apologists The History of Apologetics follows the great apologists in the history of the church to understand how they approached the task of apologetics in their own cultural and theological context. Each chapter looks at the life of a well-known apologist from history, unpacks their methodology, and details how they approached the task of defending the faith. By better understanding how apologetics has been done, readers will be better able to grasp the contextualized nature of apologetics and apply those insights to today's context. The History of Apologetics covers forty-four apologists including: Part One: Patristic Apologists Part Two: Medieval Apologists Part Three: Early Modern Apologists Part Four: 19th C. Apologists Part Five: 20th C. American Apologists Part Six: 20th C. European Apologists Part Seven: Contemporary Apologists